This is completely counter productive to growing Lemmy. I absolutely despise discord. Look at the network traffic it generates and tell me wtf they are doing. They won’t tell you. Their business model will leave you completely dumbfounded as to how they exist. Everything shared on the platform is lost in a black hole unavailable to the outside world and everything shared is a privacy nightmare. Posting this, pinning it here, and locking it is one of the biggest trolls possible. It pisses me off every time I log in. “Everyone else does it” is the excuse of idiots. Discord makes absolutely no sense to anyone that actually cares to look into it, read the user agreement, and ask sane questions about what they are doing.
Fucking hell, this again.
Listen, you people need to realize a lot of people are here on Lemmy because Reddit screwed them over, not because Lemmy is open source or less of a privacy issue or whatever your reasons for using it are.
So you hate Discord. That’s fine, you’re allowed to! But pitching a fit because everyone else doesn’t hate it isn’t gonna convince anyone to stop using it.
I don’t hate Discord, but I do hate that they seem to require my phone number. I tried joining Discord over a year ago. Upon first log in they claimed that there was suspicious activity that required me to verify the account by giving them my phone number. This was from a computer, I never even visited the site on my phone let alone use the mobile app. I gave up and forgot about until a few months ago and decided to try again. They still wanted my phone number, email wasn’t good enough. I contacted their support email and was told that there was no other option but to provide a phone number and that they couldn’t override it. So I told them to delete my account and that I would never use their service. It took two weeks for them to do it.
There are very few situations in which an app needs my phone number in my eyes. And a chat application is not one of them. Just like I refused to use the official Reddit app because it wanted access to my contacts and location. I am not a super privacy nut, but the whole hog approach of gathering my info is not acceptable. I would rather pay for the service. I would have paid for Reddit if they had gone that route rather than dropping 3rd Party apps. Instead I’m on Lemmy.
So fucking hell yes, this again.
There are alternatives to Discord.
This is shitty, but not common.
Certain channels will require a phone verified account, but most won’t.
Did you ever try on a phone or a different computer in a different location? With a different email?
I did try on phone, laptop, and desktop. I didn’t try with another email. Perhaps the channel required it, but since I was only trying to join Discord for that one channel, it wasn’t worth pursuing further. I sought and got support for my issue in other places.
If discord ever decides that your account is “suspicious” (they won’t tell you why they decide it), you will be completely locked out of your account and you can not do anything on the website unless you provide your phone number for verification. I have one such accounts too that I created for joining the community of a certain game. These are the only two screens you can access on this account:
They also helpfully tell you that you can only verify a single account with your phone number, so if I wanted to verify this account for a gaming community, I would de-verify the account I use for work, so I’m not going to do that, lest it looks “suspicious” to discord and they delete my account - For example a while ago the person who created one of the discord community “servers” we use for work got their discord account deleted (discord wouldn’t tell us a reason).
The point isn’t to bash the discord company or service, I’m just stating things that happen if you choose discord.
Must be server specific. I’ve used Discord for years and never had to add a phone number.
Everyone wants your phone number now because it’s a decent approach to combating spammers. Note that I said decent, not perfect. It’s relatively easy for a company to determine if a phone number is owned by a specific person vs. a voip company that enables spammers to use hundreds of new numbers, so now we’re asking everyone for theirs. SMS is also used for the lowest form of multi factor authentication, so they get to claim that it’s a security decision, not one for marketing, etc and because of network effects, we all have to choose to either go along or miss out.
Agree that it’s super annoying and certainly not privacy-centric, but Discord is owned by Microsoft, what can we expect? Innovation?
It also doesn’t work. I can’t use telegram because I have a number that I originally got from project fi, back when it was project fi. Eventually I moved cell providers and I migrated the phone number that I got with Project Fi. As such, a real number that I’ve had for over a decade looks like a voip range number, even though it isn’t anymore and hasn’t been for a long time.
I understand the ease for choosing phone numbers. I would love it if they gave me another option to validate.
For a community like Lemmy, I would prefer that they choose a different chat system, one that doesn’t require me to validate with a phone number. Matrix is an option and doesn’t require phone numbers.
Discord being owned by Microsoft, now that’s news to me. I don’t think that’s a thing, at least not yet.
For some reason I was convinced they had sold out, but it looks like you’re right, they’re still independent for the time being. Thanks for the note!
Your requirement to use software is based around whether or not it requires your phone number for verification?
Man some people draw really weird lines.
What makes it a weird line for them to draw?
are you in the uk? Cause that might make a difference. I’m in the US and a lot of apps use phone numbers for log in.
I understand a large number of apps request phone number to log in, but that doesn’t explain why it’s a weird line to draw to not engage with that.
so you don’t understand that it’s been normalized?
That’s why its a weird line to draw. Cause its considered normal here.
I understand it’s been normalized. I’m trying to figure out my hangup with the word “weird”… I guess ultimately I don’t consider it weird for someone to stand against something that’s normalized.
Especially since this thread is about removing the pinned post. And a lot of the people downvoting are from other instances, they don’t even see it pinned it’s just ‘discord bad’. Which is literally the top comment in this thread.
If I may, we are all probably alt juggling at the moment, the fact that you see people interacting with account from other instances does not mean the people don’t have an account on LW
Agreed. I am posting from my personal Lemmy instance but I also have a lemmy.world account. I don’t like the direction lemmy.world has been moving in and I am opposed to the way they use and promote Discord.
Reddit screw you over because it’s closed source and centralized. You need to realize that discord it’s just the same if not worst.
Yeah I’m here because I like the alternative to Reddit’s bullshit.
I couldn’t care less about Foss. I mean it’s cool, but it’s not why I’m here.
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Reddits bullshit is the end case for ANY product or service that is not FOSS.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
You should care, or else you will go through reddit all over again and again.
Yeah, Reddit wasn’t the first time we’ve seen this, and it won’t be the last.
I think at the very least we could have an open source alternative along with the discord. No reason to completely shutdown the discord.
I’ve been using it for a very long time now. (Mostly) works really well.
One already exists
Moderation tools are in progress, so probably not good for now: https://trello.com/b/4e2O7tge/revolt-roadmap
It has moderation tools already. They’re upgrading and expanding them to be more granular per user feedback.
They’re not absent as your comment leads one to believe.
Thanks for clarifying!
I just mentioned it because I know LW staff wanted extended moderation tools
Can’t you just hide the post and move on?
I actually did that. Every single time I opened the app. It just came back.
Which app?
Try blocking the user/community?
Discord is horrible
I wonder whether matrix and/or matrix bridge has been mentioned before. Maybe discord + matrix bridge is a good enough compromise for reachability.
To get the privacy benefits wouldn’t you need to forego bridges?
I have never hosted a bridge before so I may get things wrong. Please correct me where I do.
I assume this channel may be public, so any privacy concern needs to take that into account.
In terms of implementation, I was thinking that there would be 1 channel hosted on discord and 1 room on matrix being bridged together.
The benefit is that users of matrix and users of discord can participate in the same conversation without having to create an account on the other service. That way, matrix users don’t have to create a discord account or download discord app, which would be a good outcome in terms of privacy.
Edit: I have a faint memory that this is possible if the owners of the channel set it up on both ends. But I can’t find what the bridge is called, maybe it’s a different service from discord? Or I may have misunderstood things,
Yeah never consider public rooms to be private, who knows whether there is a bit logging every message sent or whatnot
true, it’s more about the service provider that users trust. For example, some might be less comfortable with creating Discord acc, which sometimes requires a phone number to be associated. I’d also venture a guess that some users may not be comfortable with Discord logging their IP address or certain metadata captured when they log in to their Discord acc.
I have matterbridge set-up on a private chatroom with few people between IRC, Discord and Matrix, because some of the ones I chat with don’t really care much about these issues, and are not moving. On matterbridge the delay is significant in some cases and I encounter a few bugs as well. Plus, by having a Discord chatroom in the first place, most people are probably not going to join the other side. We shouldn’t even promote Discord usage.
Damn that’s a shame but I remember reading something similar about time delays with bridges. While I agree that we should try to stay away from discord, I still believe bridges, if working properly, can at least be a compromise. Maybe some folks over at discord could switch over due to the interactions of such bridges.
As a tech-ignorant person who uses Discord with multiple gaming groups, what is so bad about it?
How they monetize is unknown, but they are big and well funded.
I keep my workstation behind a whitelist firewall. It is a pain, but this means I have a device that filters all network traffic and only lets websites I have added to the list to transmit and receive messages. So like, if I download something sketchy or accidentally write some buggy code, it won’t have internet access to unapproved locations.
All legitimate commercial websites have their human readable web address. So on my whitelist, I can add Lemmy.world:443 and it will allow connections to Lemmy over port 443 aka https.
Discord doesn’t do anything conventional like this. If you try to connect to discord with a whitelist firewall, and look at the blocked connection logs, all you will see are random raw IP addresses. This alone is super weird. Then you will find these addresses are trying to connect to odd ports with no documentation about what they are used for or the protocol. Discord does not provide any details whatsoever that I could find.
Okay so a few super weird connections on super sketchy ports, with no idea what they are doing, and no documentation. Hmmm. But it gets worse. I can jot down some notes for a couple of random raw IP addresses. At this point I really don’t like it, but might just grumble past it like just before reddit died. But no, trying to connect to discord after punching these holes, lead to two more random raw IP addresses and different ports, and after that it happened again. Now I’m at 6 random undocumented holes in a firewall, and it still doesn’t work and is trying for more. Fuck that bullshit. Reading their terms agreement is basically legalese for you have no rights to anything. It is totally insane that people just run this shit and don’t take 5 minutes to ask where is the money exchanging hands to fund this. Who knows, maybe it is legitimate. I fully expect to hear about it in the news one day, and I expect this one to be a giant nuclear bombshell when it happens. I keep popcorn reserves on standby.
They monetize using nitro. Discord servers use multiple different servers based on location to host the actual chat services. I’m not an expert on the inner workings but it’s actually rather complex and fascinating. If you don’t like using discords clients then maybe try an open source alternative discord client, if nothing else it will give you insight into the back end and help you better understand what’s going on behind the scenes. Technically using alternative discord clients goes against their TOS but considering your feelings on discord I doubt that will matter to you.
try a different client
technically it is against their TOS
You can’t be seriously suggesting this while also knowing it’s against their TOS. It feels especially ironic giving the massive surge in Lemmy’s popularity was over a proprietary backend blocking third party clients.
Then I guess someone should come up with a discord alternative… No? Nobody?.. Anything at all?..
So no…
matrix.org has existed for many years now. Federated and completely FOSS.
Anything, anything at all
I’ve been using it with my friends since 2015. You being unwilling to try it, or just purposefully dense and dismissive isn’t my problem.
That’s what surprised me the most.
Lemmy members using Discord feels like a vegetarian not eating chicken but enjoying beef.
Newsflash, not everyone joined lemmy because of FOSS philosophy.
Shocking, I know!
The original crop was probably here mostly because of “FOSS” ideology.
And the users from Reddit are here because a shitty company screwed them over using proprietary code that made it impossible for anybody to hold them accountable— I.E. Because as annoying and toxic and oblivious as “FOSS” advocates can be a lot of the time, sometimes it turns out that they actually had a point.
So, who am I missing?
But then, why not stay on Reddit with a Revanced app?
Why go through the hoops of using an emerging platform for a link aggregator, but not a chatroom platform?
For me it’s either both or none, which was what I expressed in the above comment.
I love Lemmy to death, I post here a lot, but I still know that objectively, Reddit using a Revanced 3rd party client is better: more content, more people, better mod tools.
After people left reddit as a statement against reddit’s policies on 3rd party apps, Lemmy just so happened to be the next best solution.
A chatroom platform like Discord is not a reddit replacement, and I do find absurd that some subreddit communities decided to move over there instead of just going to Lemmy.
People use different platforms for different reasons.
I personally use Lemmy because it’s currently the best alternative to Reddit. I use Discord because it’s the most popular instant messaging platform, and I haven’t had issues with it. I’m currently looking for a replacement for Twitter/X as I’m not confident with the way that platform is headed.
Mastodon
Yep, one of the platforms I’m looking at, and seems to be the second best contender for me. Tumblr of all places is where I’m feeling most at home
Nothing. But it’s not free and someone owns the code so they are the devil.
Lemmy.world always knows how to fly in with a dumb/hot take lol
Can’t we just have an IRC room on somewhere like Libera, please?
Or if we really need images and stuff, a Matrix room would be sufficient. Or an XMPP room…
If they hosted their own XMPP server and that got taken down by the DDOS attacks the room/MUC would be down as well, not ideal, unlike matrix
You sound very angry at a piece of software. You don’t have to use it, and you can block the community/user that posted the thing you don’t like.
Take a breath and don’t worry about it, for real. Not everything in life is for you, and you won’t like everything you see, and that’s fine. It doesn’t make your feelings invalid, but you can’t let it get to you < 3
This is an admin post. A mod blocking admin is unsustainable misalignment
Think what you want about Discord, but it has a different purpose than Lemmy or Matrix. It’s mainly a real-time chat application (with voice on top if you want). Nobody chatting on Discord will create a Lemmy post instead, two totally different forms of communication. That’s like complaining back in the day why the forum you use has an IRC room pinned.
Their business model will leave you completely dumbfounded as to how they exist.
Does it? Look up Discord Nitro, they charge a lot of money for basic functionality (like being able to share your screen above 720p, use custom emojis on other servers, promote your own server, …). They rake in plenty of money, no need to sell your data for that (which they at least say don’t do based on the terms and conditions).
Currently there is no good alternative to Discord for actual chatting. Lemmy doesn’t offer a chat function (Though the chat on Reddit was crap too). Mastodon is not a chat, it’s a Twitter alternative. And IRC has always been crap where 9 out of 10 people just idle and you don’t have a chat history.
Show me the numbers, against non paying users, infrastructure, and overhead. I don’t see this as valid. I also don’t agree with your tale on collecting and sharing data. What I read a couple of years ago was extremely vague and verbose. It also had the fuck you we can change this at any time without telling you clause. AKA, the points don’t matter so lube your butt plug because this is proprietary and you should know better clause. They are another company built on exploitation with no transparency or documentation. “Trust me” is garbage. Show me exactly what you are doing with full transparency, or you are a criminal. This is real world 21st century common sense. Discord is garbage.
They have 203 million dollars of revenue in a year from Nitro alone (the small subscription they sell): https://www.usesignhouse.com/blog/discord-stats
Then they have server boosts, which is another big pot of money on top.
And revenue share with content creators.
And Discord merch.
Tons of users too, evaluation is based on their platform + potential user base, not the actual money they pull in.
https://www.datasourse.com/how-discord-makes-money/
Maybe inform yourself first.
I feel pretty confident OP would prefer an IRC instead of Discord because it is an open standard.
where 9 out of 10 people just idle and you don’t have a chat history
You just described Discord, lol.
No matter what niche Discord server I join, if I write something in the general channel I usually get a reply in seconds to a few minutes.
IRC? Has always been a dumpster where I might not get a single reply in an hour.
That’s just a product of sheer number of users. I was there in the IRC chats 20+ years ago. You also got replies in seconds. Sometimes chat rooms flew by so fast that admins had to force timeouts or the chat was unreadable. Less people use IRC now, but they tend to be far more tech knowledgeable people, with more experience and less toxic than Discord.
I’ve been on the internet for roughly the last 27 years and I’ve never had a good experience on IRC. It always felt like a black hole for me and near unusable. No chat history, no proper channels and too many idlers.
Discord is proprietary, which isn’t great, but it has the features down pat. I can join whatever niche community and have fully indexed chat channels. I can write something new, or just search through the public logs if someone already asked my question in the past. Each server has a single topic, for example a certain game, so there’s also a split in channels for general discussion, bug reports, new player help, change logs, …
It’s well organized and does exactly what I need. And if you find someone you want to play with on a server, one click and you’re in a voice chat with them.
Compare that to the crap we used in the past: ICQ (just text chat, you had to know the ICQ number of everyone), Teamspeak (Just voice chat pretty much, I hosted my own server for over a decade, but it was always crap), Mumble (Similar to Teamspeak), …
There is a damn good reason why Discord is the standard nowadays. You might not like it, but that’s just the way it is.
No chat history
This is patently false. Your chat history is in your client AND in most cases put online somewhere by the admins or a bot they control. I can still go look at my IRC chats from 18 years ago today.
I’m talking about chat history for the entire channel, no matter if you’re online or not.
Maybe admins can put them up somewhere in another place, but they are never there when you join fresh in a channel.
It just sounds like you have very little actual experience with IRC. You can go ahead and downvote me all you want. I’ve been running IRC servers for a very long time. Any of the servers worth spending time on host their logs… Often with a link in the topic.
Sounds like you’re hanging out in the wrong places on IRC. As an open source contributor IRC is a place where I do a lot of my coordination.
Matrix itself works fantastically for chat, we use it to coordinate conversations for kbin. It’s like a non shit version of discord (minus the video / audio support I guess)
Currently there is no good alternative to Discord for actual chatting.
Matrix?
Moderation?
As you’ve probably seen from another comment
https://github.com/Gnuxie/Draupnir
The bot by default includes support for bans, redactions, anti-spam, server ACLs, room directory changes, room alias transfers, account deactivation, room shutdown, and more.
And I know it’s self hosted and thus requires more work, which is why I suggested elsewhere to have a team of volunteers setting it up (the matrix room and draupnir server), presenting it to the LW admins, and letting they choose of they want to endorse it.
What do you think of that? It would give people supporting Matrix a way to constructively try to come up with a solution that can potentially make everyone happy.
Cool but what if i dont have access to the server? As this would 3x the managing effort of the LW team.
- Matrix Server - Probably gets ddosed too
- The bot itself
- Learn Matrix itself for moderation, managing the server.
At all LW wants to server a reliable ( unddosable ) service where you can get an response 99% of the time. And not “silencable” with a ddos. That costs more and more money.
In this scenario, the newly formed Matrix would be in charge of those. They manage the servers, they moderate the chats, they even set up their own funding for recurring costs.
LW staff can have access, but most of the operations are performed by the Matrix team.
I am suggesting this as a way to have satisfying end to this discussion:
- either the volunteers realize it’s impossible to use Matrix for this usecase, make it public, and then Discord becomes the reasonable solution
- either the solution works and it can be used
It’s a win win in any case, and probably a way to appease the resentment we can see in this thread
Yeah but tbh, the only users who complain are outside LW. That is what LW admins see and think hmmm not so many LW users complain, rather only those who cant even see its pinned.
It would add more effort and trust for LW again.
The usecase will be blocked by 3 factors:
We want it reliable, stable and not ddosable platform
- Matrix can be ddosed and it would create extra costs and effort to stop it.
Matrix is not userfriendly so much. It is hard to create custom bots for it.
And the new liability risk it would add to LW would be not great
Yeah but tbh, the only users who complain are outside LW. That is what LW admins see and think hmmm not so many LW users complain, rather only those who cant even see its pinned.
They probably were LW at some point, and then left for one reason or another. It’s fair to ignore your former users, but I guess the reputation of LW might be impacted, and you might see more and more people advising others to move (you can already see it from time to time).
Matrix can be ddosed and it would create extra costs and effort to stop it.
Is it that easy to DDoS? I had a quick look, it seems that if CF is used there is already some mitigation (https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/8691).
I’m aware that Lemmy is still vulnerable to DDoS even behind CF, but as Matrix is older, the codebase should be more mature.
Matrix is not userfriendly so much.
Lemmy isn’t that friendly either, still we are all here. My core message is always that due to the emerging nature of Lemmy, I would except Lemmy users to be ready to use less polished software, in a Matrix vs Discord scenario. Otherwise, why bother with Lemmy and just not directly use Reddit with revanced apps?
That’s definitely a scenario, Blaze. If we were to eventually launch a Matrix space or room, it would be with our own team and tools, just like how it is on Discord. Representation and safety are important here.
And as it took time to develop & set things up for Discord, it would take even more time and effort for Matrix. So pushing for it won’t help you here. I do appreciate your intention though.
Thanks for appreciating the idea.
It’s probably going to be my last message about this topic (I already phrased some of my concerns with Rooki in another comment), but I just would like to repeat that allowing other people to help you could be a good way to leverage help of the community.
IIRC, that’s what happened in the early days of LW, when LW admins and Lemmy devs would work together on fixing the Lemmy codebase, put to a real life workload for the first time.
People in this thread seem eager to push for Matrix, you can either try to canalize their efforts into something productive, and then include it to LW, or just push for a proprietary platform they seem to despise, which will probably make them look somewhere else to build an open source solution.
At the end of the day, the decision if yours, as always in the Fediverse, people are free to come and go.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion, and have a good one!
Yeah, I was wondering what that was doing up still.
It’s a unabashed admission from the admin that this site isn’t taken seriously, nor the FOSS mindset that built the infrastructure + most of the userbase. Real disappointing for sure, but especially considering the other decisions that have been made recently on this platform -it’s gonna be a ghost town soon.
it’s gonna be a ghost town soon.
Curious to see how it will evolve. I guess more and more people disagreeing with this decision might leave, we’ll see how it goes.
What people don’t get is that self-hosting a Discord-like is not a solution. The idea is to have a fallback in case the server goes down, and Discord serves that role well.
Snoo about to collect downvotes like pokemons
Bring it on!
An admin complaining about downvotes doesn’t inspire confidence in the running of the instance.
it’s a joke, if you didn’t notice
A fallback for what? Discord is a chat program that usually devolves into garbage memes and off-topic nonsense instantly.
Discord is a chat program that usually devolves into garbage memes and off-topic nonsense instantly.
This… Is somehow different from Lemmy other than the chat vs forum aspect?
Are you asking me if night is different than day?
It’s so the admins can communicate when the server is down. Would you rather they use Twitter?
Why not use IRC in that case, like normal Internet persons?
Don’t we already have a Matrix Channel for that? Even if they wanted a lemmy.world specific Space it’s still Far better than proprietary Discord. I mean isn’t it already encouraged to link Matrix for secure messaging, why not just use a Space on Matrix for lemmy.world support and communication.
Mastodon?
which instance?
Why does it matter?
https://joinmastodon.org/servers lists a lot of options.
Why does it matter?
Because it needs to be DDOS-resistant and be able to handle at least 128k users. Otherwise it’s not a fallback in case lemmy.world is targeted again. There are groups who hate LW and still want to take it down, if they know that their alternative communication channel is also some other self-hosted service they’re going to target that one too.
So please list one instance which would satisfy these criteria.
Isn’t content from Mastodon federated across the instances? Meaning that LW could just open an account on any Mastodon server (not their own, to avoid to handle both at the same time in case of issues)?
Or are you saying that Mastodon is as DDoS vulnerable as Lemmy, making the server that would host the LW account a DDoS target?
Edit: you edited in the meantime, but I guess our exchange still makes sense
Uh He never said it has to be self-hosted though, so this already sounds like a strawman argument. Only one who has mentioned self hosting in this thread is you.
People want something that is secure and respects privacy, they could simply use the Matrix channel, or create their own Matrix space specific to lemmy.world , both of these would be better options for the users than to try and get them to use Discord which is a proprietary corporate service that is not only prone to security problems but also has some serious privacy concerns due to being corporate owned.
Even Discord issues aside, it just seems strange to have a proprietary software used for a platform as open source as Lemmy.
It would be as strange as having a Twitter account for the instance.
Especially since there is already a lemmy.world announcement community…
Which is our main platform for announcements and the discord server is just to complement LW not to replace any of it.
Not hating, just was confused by the shift. I missed the piracy defed announcement because I didn’t realize there was the discord announcements too now.
I know, didn’t take your comment as ‘hate’.
But that won’t happen again. Should have been on LW first but with a DDOS happening the admin decided to put it on discord first.
Just wanted to be clear with how emotionally charged these topics have become for so many of the users here lately…
And didn’t even think about it being in response to the DDOS attacks. That makes sense.
I wish you guys would use a Matrix Space for annoucements as a complementary space, that way we wouldn’t have to use a proprietary platform to hear about what’s going on if lemmy.world is down.
It’s because Discord provides a functionality Lemmy does not yet offer. Forums having a connected chatroom is not a new thing at all, and that was true with subreddits and discords. Back when I moderated forums, the mod teams had a private mod forum, but also hung out in the IRC chat. Easy, instant communication for the community, particularly it’s management, is useful.
The problem isn’t the existence of a chatroom, it’s that they used Discord. But I don’t believe there’s a fediverse alternative for chat functionality like that, at least not yet. So it’s a matter of which centralized platform you choose: Discord, Matrix, etc
But Discord is also a useful reference point for new users who may need guidance on how to use lemmy, but already know how to use discord. It’s familiar, and popular. Call it onboarding if you like. It’s using Discord’s platform to help ease users into Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole.
Why not just use IRC?
Discord is a modern platform a lot of people enjoy using. IRC isn’t.
No media support and closing the client and you DC from the channel, not ideal for modern use cases such as being on mobile devices or a laptop on a train and your connection drops while you go through a tunnel
We’ve had IRC bouncers since at least psybnc in the 90s…
And how many average users would know about those or bother to either set one up or go sign up on one
Good points. I’ve always gotten around the terminal issue by using irssi + screen
Zoomers can’t deal without their embedded images. Clicking a link to view a meme is so 1990s.
Nice domain name!
Thanks!
I get the need to have a chat, we also setup one for the moderators of one of my community
Matrix is a pretty good alternative to Discord, with moderation possible via https://github.com/Gnuxie/Draupnir.
It’s not a perfect one to one match, but Lemmy is not one for Reddit either, still we are all here.
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IMO that’s being too fanatic. I love FOSS, but you don’t have to use FOSS for absolutely everything. Making a FOSS product does not mean you need to use FOSS for everything. And sometimes the closed source options are simply the best. Eg, GitHub and Discord are widely considered the best options in their field.
Also, at least before Twitter became such a shitty alt-right shit hole, many FOSS products did have twitter accounts! That’s just part of promoting your product and providing an alternative place to contact and discuss. Eg, when Reddit went down, I’d usually check their twitter to get updates on it.
GitHub and Discord are widely considered the best options in their field.
Git, sure, I sold them here anybody complain about it, and get literally is the host for most FOSS, so supporting it isn’t exactly hurting the cause. But suggesting Discord is the best depends on how you’re judging that criteria. Best for who? Admins or users?
Moreover, if we’re going to start getting into the nitty gritty about what the “best” options are in any field, then FOSS dies in most cases. Volunteers simply cannot compete with a bunch of paid developers, but they will do their best.
Plex, for example, blows Jellyfin out of the water in terms of polish and simplicity. If you’re judging best on how easy it is, and how likely it is the average person’s going to run into issues, Plex beats its FOSS competition by a mile. But that’s not the whole story, is it? That doesn’t take the enshitification factor into account, or the fact that forces you to pay for certain things that your computer is effectively doing on its own.
But the other thing to remember is that what truly kills FOSS is people just simply not supporting it. The more you use these established, centralized, biggest names, the further you entrench them, and the harder it becomes for any serious alternative to justify its existence.
Eg, GitHub and Discord are widely considered the best options in their field.
Librewolf moved to Codeberg a few weeks ago, so I guess there are still alternatives.
As said elsewhere, Mozilla uses Matrix.
Following that logic, why do we bother using Lemmy in the first place? We could just go back to Reddit, using revanced apps with personal API keys, and call it a day.
Also, at least before Twitter became such a shitty alt-right shit hole, many FOSS products did have twitter accounts!
They did, but then Twitter went to shit. Reddit was fine, until it went to shit. If the Piped project were to use a subreddit instead of [email protected] , wouldn’t that be a missed opportunity too? FOSS project should support each other, otherwise it questions their existence in the first place. Why would other organisations and companies bother with the FOSS alternatives if FOSS projects themselves don’t?
Following that logic, why do we bother using Lemmy in the first place?
I mean, I’m only here cause reddit sucks and I wanted to see if Lemmy has a different atmosphere. So far it does. Too bad its kinda dead around here.
Enjoy your stay! It’s quieter indeed
yeah I was hoping for more interaction. I’m still digging for communities that have my interests too.
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yeah. I think about contributing to content but I also see a lot of what seems like people just posting links and media into the void.
What are your interests?
I watch a lot of old tv and I see communities here for that but they seem to lean towards newer media - reddit has all kinds of niche subs that get traffic and interaction for the stuff I like. Unfortunately its not worth it to be there for it cause so many people are there to just troll/make things difficult for people.
I also like make up and J-fashion. I saw no communities for either and the closest I saw was a goth community which isn’t geared towards the fashion, but the music side of it.
Really like having local communities too. I’m in Portland, OR which has several sub reddits - but there are communities here that seem to get no interaction, just posts with links.
Also artwork, I’m an artist and looked around at the art communities here. Nothing really stood out. It seems to be reposting other people’s art or just art that doesn’t fit on other sites so nothing that I actually like, where as I have to get that mostly on tumblr anyway. That’s the only place I seem to find artwork I enjoy and fanart. I’m really shocked there isn’t a fanart community here. I supposed I could start one but then I run the risk of reposting artwork and needing to credit everytime and the inevitable risk of me just posting and no interactions. (if you’re not familiar, some artists don’t like reposts even if they are credited for it)
When I use the lemmy explorer, I find a lot of communities like that too. Seems to be one or two people posting, no posts get comments.
There’s also radio shows and podcasts I listen to and I don’t see any communities for those either but I think those are like some really niche interests of mine and I was shocked that Phil Hendrie had a sub reddit even, the guy is so unheard of.
I guess not liking mainstream stuff is really shooting me in the foot but like, I can’t help what I like?
Why are we telling people to go somewhere else that makes no sense
It’s not a replacement for lemmy.world , but rather a backup site for announcements when .world goes down.
Doesn’t have to be done specifically over Discord, does it
Most people know Discord compared to Matrix lol.
Most people know Reddit compared to Lemmy lol.
You’re already asking a lot of reddit refugees to use Matrix over Discord, most who don’t give much of a shit what’s FOSS or not.
That makes sense, sometimes you have to go with the pragmatic option instead of the ideal. I think we don’t give the non-tech-inclined user enough credit when it comes to their ability to adapt to change though and I see value in encouraging the use of FOSS wherever possible since wider adoption can encourage further development.
Not saying I agree here, because I don’t, but I think the idea is that lemmy.world is down so much that they wanted a stable platform for meta stuff.
I might be more sympathetic to that idea if they made announcements on the Discord and on Lemmy at as close to the same time as possible, but they don’t.
They should make announcements on another instance of lemmy then thats the whole point if one instance is down you can use a different one
Mozilla uses matrix … so that might be a good idea
Why care so much. Nobody forces you to do anything, don’t like it don’t use it and you can still enjoy Lemmy World. The entitlement is a bit much honestly.
Edit: for some perspective. This comment currently has 23 downvotes, only 5 of them are from Lemmy World users that actually see the local pinned post.
If you’re so upset about out-of-instance interaction, just defederate altogether from all other instances. Turn into Truth Social. Or close the server. Jesus, just take criticism with grace.
This thread is about unpinning a local thread. Something that does not affect people from another instance at all.
It pushes people to other instances. It is quite disenfranchising to some. I was here before you by a small margin, and was one of the most active users in promotion of positive community building. You are creating a problem no different than reddit. Matrix is the alternative built into Lemmy. Your resistance to this is why you should not be admin here.
criticism
Which has no merit at all to begin with, since out-of-instance users do not see the pinned posts of Lemmy.world. He’s right to call out most of you for simply concern-trolling.
Most of you
How hateful. I’m a user of this instance and I dislike that stupid pinned message. It’s ok to have a Discord chat, but to have a promotion permanently pinned is a power trip move.
He’s literally telling you that most of the downvotes are not from lemmy.world (because as an admin you can only see downvotes from your local instance, which means the rest are certainly not from there).
As said elsewhere, people on Lemmy are alt juggling quite a lot these days.
Having someone voting from another does not mean the user doesn’t have an account on LW.
Is your main account on lemmy.world?
It was until I couldn’t use it for weeks due to server instability.
Are we trying to register who’s spending how much time where now?
I should switch back to my lemmy.world account to downvote you in a better way?
And you not taking the critisism about discords shady data mining and privacy practices seriously makes you look trolling.
Yup! Its not a forced thing. Where you get “special” news or so. Its just a off site platform where LW can tell whats wrong if the site goes offline. For the casual user, its the easiest to join.
Its just a off site platform where LW can tell whats wrong if the site goes offline.
Hello,
Thank you for your work!
For that specific use case, would it be possible to set-up a Mastodon account posting heads-up about incidents?
There are already monitoring sites that provide that info:
I am well aware of those, but then what type of information is on Discord? Why cannot that just be added in comments to the incidents on the status pages?
I don’t know what’s on Discord; I haven’t joined the lemmy.world server. All the important announcements are on lemmy.world. if it’s down, then it’s down, come back later.
I have to say I agree.
Up next only Linux users allowed on Lemmy
Only circlejerk allowed on Lemmy
As you admins high five and circle jerk each other over your shitty decisions.
But this means that the community chat will be in discord. If I want to chat with other members in this community, I need to join discord.
So it would be better if another option would be advertised
Sadly to manage Matrix is more difficult and harder to moderate ( there is no mod bot and developing is a mess )
I thought https://github.com/Gnuxie/Draupnir was a solution?
Edit: just had a look at the chat and updated the link
But normally you didn’t have a direct community chat either. Discord is easily accessible, usable and scalable for that use at the moment, so whoever wants it can use it. In the meantime, there’s absolutely no force keeping you from suggesting better options.
If volunteers were to setup a Matrix room, would it be possible to add a pinned post with it in a similar way to the Discord one?
As always, thank you for your work!
That would interfere with any official matrix set up by our team should we decide to in the future. I appreciate your proposal don’t get me wrong but then others will ask the same for their own ideas/projects and the announcement community is strictly for official Lemmy World announcements.
I completely understand, and that’s why I was a bit surprised by AvaddonLFC comment just above about “suggesting better options”.
Quite a few people already mentioned Matrix, so I don’t see what else people could do?
How would you handle brigading, spam attacks, lemmy account verification, and high user traffic on a public Matrix room with little to no customisation or mod tools? Genuinely curious.
Using https://github.com/Gnuxie/Draupnir ?
The bot by default includes support for bans, redactions, anti-spam, server ACLs, room directory changes, room alias transfers, account deactivation, room shutdown, and more.
The Lemmy account verification is an interesting point, how is it currently handle in Discord? There might be a way to have a similar mechanism in Matrix.
Edit: had a look at the Matrix chat and updated the link
Yeah, there are not a lot of alternatives. We’ll see about matrix but that would mean more work for us too. I’s not that we have anything against matrix really, it’s that discord is what most of us had been using before.
And we have people like @[email protected] writing kickass bots for it.
We’ll see about matrix but that would mean more work for us too.
That makes sense, which is why I suggested another team of volunteer setting that up, and then proposing it to the LW admins, who would then decide if the solution look good enough for them to be officially endorsed?
That would allow the people pushing for Matrix to start working on a solution that could potentially satisfy everyone.
